In “Thistle Latch” a man’s memory of a strange boy who used to live
in the woods before disappearing leads to his rediscovery, decades later,
amidst a vision of an orgiastic scene of rampant, mutating flora. “The Old
Pageant” is about a couple who visits a
long-deserted cabin in the woods where a strange mimicry takes place (“if we
weren’t careful there would be things from the woods that would take our place
in the world”). “Tinder Row” depicts
a dead-end street near the town’s main viaduct where the soil is thin, “not in
its physical compound but rather its spiritual aspect”, so that it enables
“Soul-moulting”. In the touching “Wormwood Votaries” a man meets
his childhood self and rekindles memories of his encounters with elemental
spirits and of watching with “the Eyes of the Spine”. And “Primeval Wood” features a strange humanoid hawthorn growth (reminiscent
of a primitive idol) in the woods which affects its founder, a suddenly single
man, proving, like many other tales in this book, that “certain miracles
are reserved for the wayward and the damned”.

Those who dwell unseen
within the hedge, the grotesques emergent in the weave of tangled roots, the
writhing form amid the shadows of the Willow boughs—all are keepers of a rustic
and terrible wisdom predating the emergence of mankind. Lurching between
disembodiment and wholly manifest flesh, the baleful forces of wasteland and
rural barren have long been etched upon the human soul.

From the preeminent author
of At Fear’s Altar and The Benighted Path comes Sylvan Dread, Richard Gavin's long
awaited fifth collection of preternatural tales. Bound within are thirteen
nightmares exploring the Sinister Pastoral, the dominion prevailing at the
intersection of mortal reckoning and the primoridum of daemonic Nature.

As a meditation on the
forces of predation and parasitism, monstrous fecundity and decay, and those
hidden folk who occupy the spaces between the branches, Sylvan Dread evokes the primeval
wood — the place where all dreams and nightmares begin. In this isolate copse
we witness the excavation of abominations long earthbound, the twilight of the
rational, and the forgotten violence of the Dionysian Rite.

' Gavin's writing serves as
a testament that great masters once crafted great stories
...and as evidence that they shall do so again.'--- Thomas Ligotti

While there is something of
a Richard Gavin “voice” that runs through all my fiction and thus gives it some
type of continuity, I do feel that SYLVAN DREAD marks a departure from the more
recognizably weird horror stories I’ve done previously. These are more folk
horror and ghost stories. With this book I made an earnest effort to
beguile rather than disturb. I worked closely with Daniel A. Schulke, my editor
at Three Hands Press, who encouraged me to drift as far from commercial genre
fiction as I wished to go. These stories are still supernatural horror, but
they operate more on the fringes of that form. As a writer, I am happiest when
wayfaring, when I’m bewildered by a half-formed narrative. None of my stories
are ever plotted in advance. They set their own course and I simply transcribe
them. I trust my instincts enough to know when to shelve a piece because it is
losing its thunder. That is how my four previous books have been created.

How personal are the stories in this collection in terms of actual
experiences, memories?

There is a great deal of
personal memory and impression in the book. But it bears stating that,
ultimately, these are works of fiction. Readers needn’t look for what they
suspect to be an author’s biographical confessions in the text. Again, as I
stated earlier, my stories may inspire people in a literary sense, but they
should never be taken in a literal sense. I believe that any writer worth
their salt should be doing more than manufacturing plots and characters. They
should be conveying their keenest impressions of existence. After all, developing
a highly personalized mode of literature, a genre of one if you will, is the
only hope a writer has at creating something original. Plots, themes,
characters – all of these things slip into broad archetypal patterns that
have existed for millennia. All the stories have been told. But they have not
been told by us, and that makes all the difference.

How have your esoteric and mystical beliefs shaped your fiction?

I believe in the hidden
realm that lies within and beyond the world of forms and matter. This
perspective has allowed me to live the bulk of my life in a liminal state. I
find the logic-obsessed, materialistic, industrialized civilization to be a
planetary madhouse, thus I keep my interactions with it to a bare minimum. For
all the benefits that civilization has granted humanity, it has also all but
divorced us from living deeper, more reflective lives. It has caused us to
regard nature and the animal kingdom as little more than resources to be
exploited. In the Middle Ages the clergy tended to regard nature as a
demonic realm and in a certain respect they were correct; nature’s will is
stronger than ours and its ways can demolish humanity’s ambitions in an
instant, whether those ambitions take the form of building a house in a
hurricane zone or attempting to live one’s life according to a set of
intellectual commandments that run counter to our instincts. A pious man may
want to dedicate his body and soul to the tenets of some hygienic faith, but
his instincts will always prevail. Lust, anger, and other natural energies
infiltrate our lives. Try debating your body out of being sexually aroused or
from its fight-or-flight response. It is pointless.

Humanity tends to fear or
despise that which it cannot control, which is why supernatural horror
serves as the perennial inconvenient reminder that there will always be forces
that thwart an individual from his or her “life-plan.” 21st-century
humankind dwells in a bubble of egoism, willful ignorance, and
self-gratification at all costs. That is a worldview I don’t even respect, let
alone share. Given this, my fiction is the polar opposite of conservative
horror. Instead of warning against the terrible things that will occur if one
dares to break the social contract, my work is about people who slip through
civilization’s cracks and thereby feel the scales peeling back from their eyes.
There is a great deal of dread in my work, but people always fear breaking the
mould that coddles them. What my characters find is that those conservative
rules you referenced have been not their safeguard but their blinders. They
achieve liberation in all its beauty and awfulness.

Are your activities in the fields of the occult and of horror fiction
part of the same process, or are they relatively different?

My ethos is fairly
holistic. My engagement (or what some might prefer to call faith) in the Spirit
realm is often, but not always, given expression in my fiction. The most marked
distinction between these two pursuits is that when I am writing fiction I am
cognizant of the fact that narratives are something that every reader engages
with for different reasons. Some read horror stories purely for entertainment;
others analyze the genre’s socio-political subtext; readers like myself tend to
favour works that evoke and satisfy a deeply-held poetic sense of the haunted
and the unworldly. There is no correct or incorrect way to read fiction.

I wish to be clear that my
stories are not attempts to proselytize or to convince readers of anything. My
fiction can be read as literary evocations of esoteric experiences, but they
should never be mistaken for literal reportage of those experiences. There is a
marked difference between weaving a thread of the authentic into a narrative in
order to arouse a response in a reader and foolishly presuming that a reader or
indeed an author accepts supernatural stories as being thoroughly and literally
real.

How do you deal with the almost inevitable (or is it?) demonizing of the
things you love? I’d assume you’re a lover of nature, but horror genre demands
that it is depicted in its darker aspects, as a threatening force, as a source
of terror…

I love nature because it is
both beautiful and threatening. I believe that nature has always represented
the ineffable and that the bulk of humanity has always resented it for that
reason. We are reliant on nature, are inextricably bound to it, and yet many
cannot reconcile themselves with that vast, unfeeling and often baffling
world. Nature is not the inert, pastoral backdrop to our lives any more than
the past is some remote relic. Both are living and often perilous things.

You also have a new non-fiction book, THE BENIGHTED PATH, which deals
with a lesser-known esoteric tradition. What is it really about?

The Biocentric
philosopher-mystic Ludwig Klages (1872 – 1956) developed the term Night
Consciousness to describe this mode of engaging with the world on a primordial,
imagistic level, as opposed to the rational mode that has dominated the present
age. Through this intuitive, poetic experience, one can interact with the soul
of reality that dwells within and beneath the physical realm. Though the word
"benighted" developed a negative connotation meaning “ignorance,” my
book restores its original meaning, which was to be overcome by darkness. That
may sound unappealing to many, but it is how I’ve lived the bulk of my life.

Algernon Blackwood spent some time in Canada and was inspired by it for
some of his best tales, including “Wendigo”. He was also, just like you, deeply
involved in the mystical and the occult. How close or different to him and his
approach to mystical (occasionally cosmic) horror do you feel?

Blackwood is one of my
literary touchstones. Discovering his work in my early twenties was a
revelation. His work exhibited that rare quality that I’d been trying (ineptly
and awkwardly, for I was a novice writer) to imbue my fiction with: a sense of
ecstasy. Even many of the classic horror authors I admired lacked this quality.
Their apparitions were often fashioned to either simply scare or to act as some
kind of warning against doing that which man was not meant to do. Algernon
Blackwood expressed not simply terror but also beauty. That is something I
strive to convey myself. I utilize fear as a sensitizing force, a way to flex
the reader’s perceptions of the world and of themselves. By first evoking
terror, I can then introduce various visions or concepts that I find beautiful.
Conversely, the things I find beautiful are often terrifying. These two
emotions are inseparable in my work.

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"Can you look around this world and believe in goodness of a god who rules it?! Famine, pestilence, slaughter, disease and death... They rule this world. If a god of love and life ever did exist, he's long since dead. Someone... Something... rules in his place..."-Prince Prospero-

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clayTo mould me man? Did I solicit theeFrom darkness to promote me?-

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Dejan Ognjanovic was born in Nis, Serbia, in 1973. He worked as a TA in American Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, Nis (1999-2009). Got his MA in 2009 ('Gothic Motifs in the Works of E. A. Poe') and his PhD in 2012 ('Historical Poetics of Horror Genre in Anglo-American Literature'). Writes book and film reviews and articles for Rue Morgue magazine. In Serbia he has published 9 books: novels In Vivo (2003) and The Seducer (2014); three studies: Faustian Screen: The Devil in Cinema (2006), In the Hills, the Horrors: Serbian Horror Film (2007) and Poetics of Horror (2014), a collection of essays A Study in Terror (2008) and a book of interviews More than Truth (2017); and he edited H. P. Lovecraft's best stories (Nekronomikon, 2008.) and co-edited The New Frames (2008), on Serbian cinema. His essays were published in the books edited by Steven Schneider: 100 European Horror Films, 501 Movie Directors, 101 Horror / SF / Gangster / War Movies You Must See Before You Die, and also in Speaking of Monsters (2012) and Digital Nightmares (2015). He is an editor at Orfelin Publishing (Novi Sad, Serbia). His reviews in English can be found at Beyond Hollywood, Unrated and Quiet Earth.